On getting our own houses in order...

Most of my day was spent at Russell Square House. Adrian and I met with Stuart Roberts and Richard Paugh of the Corporate Executive Board, in the morning, to consider options for partnership with its CIO Practice Area. In the afternoon, we met Spencer Green and Richard Owen from GDS International, considering possibilities for working with its MeettheBoss networking channel. Both meetings were follow-ups to earlier meetings I had with representatives of those organisations, with a view to potentially setting-up an executive stream within Socitm to facilitate ICT leadership and executive engagement, and ensure that we do not compromise the Society’s IT management legacy as we grow our support for the wider profession.

There were attractions in working with both organisations. The CIO Executive Board was particularly strong in executive insight, networking and analysis, whilst the MeettheBoss format uses Web 2.0 technologies effectively to support networking in a disparate environment. Adrian and Steve Jones have also had discussions with Learning Pool, in a wider Society context.

The next, critical, stage is to develop the financial and business models for consideration by Socitm’s Board and NAC.


Then, Mark Brett joined Adrian and me to discuss his role in conjunction with our forthcoming appointment of a Socitm Head of Policy. Mark’s work on Information Assurance has been invaluable for Socitm and, frankly, has been largely self-directed, and its worth has not been truly appreciated. (So far as we’re aware, Mark is currently our only CLAS Consultant.) Some of the activity Mark has undertaken for us will become part of the new appointee’s role, but Adrian and I were keen to take the opportunity to use Mark’s expertise to formalise effective resourcing of Information Assurance and Security policy and requirements through a Head of Information Assurance role - through which to further build our capabilities in this area. We therefore used the session to develop a better understanding of the IA/ Security scene, with a view to further developing proposals.


I’m not an avid follower of Sitemorse, but couldn’t help noticing the reference, in its recent newsletter, to the frequency with which some of the LGA’s recently proscribed words can be found on its own website! “A number of the banned words were found when looking at some of their website pages, worse offender being worklessness, which occurred nearly 100 times, other culprits included; spatial, framework, initiative.”